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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Since we implemented our discovery service, I noticed that increasingly we are asked by users if there was a way to use Summon to browse , clearly users new to a topic were overwhelmed by the number of results they were getting and besides recommender systems, browsing can be seen as a way to navigate - "knowing it when I see it".

Curious I looked around to see what libraries are doing for online browsing and the main way of doing it is still to create virtual bookshelves. Here are some examples.

This seems to be the easiest and perhaps most common method. LibraryThing for Libraries is a catalog enhancement that you can add to your opac which adds many features to each catalog entry by pulling in tags, reviews, "similar books" and more.

This is actually using the Related Items Bookshelf widget that was developed for Polk Library, UW Oshkosh by Maccabee Levine and is released as open source software that works for Voyager WebVoyage Opacs.

Images are drawn from Syndetics and Google Book Search cover images , and google analytics can be used to track usage.

But of course all this is old hat to him, while others have embedded virtual browse into their webopac, as usual Dave has gone a step further and has now embedded the shelf browse into Summon the web scale discovery service they are using.

For those unfamiliar with Summon or web scale discovery services, many web scale discovery services will show items from the catalogue in the discovery search, but clicking on the result will bring you to the classic catalogue (web opac).

This is often very jarring to users who are suddenly dumped into a much older interface and may get confused if they continue their search there.

Summon provides yet another option with the optional catalog details page that serves as a catalogue record.

While the default Summon catalogue details page is pretty good, Dave Pattern has managed to customize it (I believe with jQuery), to bring in features he has worked on for his opac. This includes the virtual shelf browse feature.

I would also add that the default Summon catalogue details pages, does not include tabs, though it does bring in book reviews.

Curtin University library is using Primo Central another discovery service, so they can easily embed the shelf browse feature via a tab "Browse shelf" into their discovery service as it serves both as the catalogue and (article) discovery service.

This virtual book shelf has many "manifestations", besides the shelf browse on the library search, it includes New Books display , mini-carousel etc. It's pretty impressive, I encourage you to check them out.

By Harvard, this is probably the most sophisticated in terms of browsing features, I am still trying to wrap my brain around it.

This is a fairly complicated visualization, with the depth of the color telling you how much use it got and the thickness of the book, telling you how many pages it has. The length is the actual length of the item. You can switch contexts by subject headings etc . It also covers more than just books, also includes CDs and DVDs.

I would add both searches now coexist , with NLB Searchplus interface providing accessing to eresources and books (basically it's catalogue + federated search), and the catalogue just the normal catalogue items (but enhanced with facets etc so counts as a next generation library catalogue).

However, and I could be wrong here but I think the "people who borrowed this also borrowed" feature in this catalogue seems to be drawing from a different recommendation system, or so it seems to me as I get totally different results comparing the two?

Conclusion

The main issue is that currently these methods work only for physical items with a call number or in best case scenario ebooks, but not articles (which are the largest source of results in discovery).

But how would one browse articles? By citation data? subject headings? Authors? Visualization wouldn't be quite as fun, since you don't get those nice book covers.

PS : This will probably be my last post before Google Reader finally dies. See you on another RSS reader, in case case thank you dear readers for your support of my blog since 2009!

Since we implemented our discovery service, I noticed that increasingly we are asked by users if there was a way to use Summon to browse , clearly users new to a topic were overwhelmed by the number of results they were getting and besides recommender systems, browsing can be seen as a way to navigate - "knowing it when I see it".

Curious I looked around to see what libraries are doing for online browsing and the main way of doing it is still to create virtual bookshelves. Here are some examples.

This seems to be the easiest and perhaps most common method. LibraryThing for Libraries is a catalog enhancement that you can add to your opac which adds many features to each catalog entry by pulling in tags, reviews, "similar books" and more.

This is actually using the Related Items Bookshelf widget that was developed for Polk Library, UW Oshkosh by Maccabee Levine and is released as open source software that works for Voyager WebVoyage Opacs.

Images are drawn from Syndetics and Google Book Search cover images , and google analytics can be used to track usage.

But of course all this is old hat to him, while others have embedded virtual browse into their webopac, as usual Dave has gone a step further and has now embedded the shelf browse into Summon the web scale discovery service they are using.

For those unfamiliar with Summon or web scale discovery services, many web scale discovery services will show items from the catalogue in the discovery search, but clicking on the result will bring you to the classic catalogue (web opac).

This is often very jarring to users who are suddenly dumped into a much older interface and may get confused if they continue their search there.

Summon provides yet another option with the optional catalog details page that serves as a catalogue record.

While the default Summon catalogue details page is pretty good, Dave Pattern has managed to customize it (I believe with jQuery), to bring in features he has worked on for his opac. This includes the virtual shelf browse feature.

I would also add that the default Summon catalogue details pages, does not include tabs, though it does bring in book reviews.

Curtin University library is using Primo Central another discovery service, so they can easily embed the shelf browse feature via a tab "Browse shelf" into their discovery service as it serves both as the catalogue and (article) discovery service.

This virtual book shelf has many "manifestations", besides the shelf browse on the library search, it includes New Books display , mini-carousel etc. It's pretty impressive, I encourage you to check them out.

By Harvard, this is probably the most sophisticated in terms of browsing features, I am still trying to wrap my brain around it.

This is a fairly complicated visualization, with the depth of the color telling you how much use it got and the thickness of the book, telling you how many pages it has. The length is the actual length of the item. You can switch contexts by subject headings etc . It also covers more than just books, also includes CDs and DVDs.

I would add both searches now coexist , with NLB Searchplus interface providing accessing to eresources and books (basically it's catalogue + federated search), and the catalogue just the normal catalogue items (but enhanced with facets etc so counts as a next generation library catalogue).

However, and I could be wrong here but I think the "people who borrowed this also borrowed" feature in this catalogue seems to be drawing from a different recommendation system, or so it seems to me as I get totally different results comparing the two?

Conclusion

The main issue is that currently these methods work only for physical items with a call number or in best case scenario ebooks, but not articles (which are the largest source of results in discovery).

But how would one browse articles? By citation data? subject headings? Authors? Visualization wouldn't be quite as fun, since you don't get those nice book covers.

PS : This will probably be my last post before Google Reader finally dies. See you on another RSS reader, in case case thank you dear readers for your support of my blog since 2009!